Before confused forumdwellers (and trolls) get here, I shall point out the following:

Spoiler:

The joke is that Douglas Hofstadter...you can look him up on Wikipedia. Anyway, he wrote several 700-page books spanning a range of genres. The autobiagraphy* consists of six words, which, when added to their initialismization, form a complete sentence: "I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym" + ISMETA = "I'm so meta, even this acronym is meta."

Trust Hofstadter to squeeze eight words into a six word autobiography.

Actually we're lucky it stopped there - if he'd had a few more words he'd probably have found a way to encode a self-replicating loop/entity into his own autobiography, which in turn would have ended up generating its own autobiography, which in turn...

I saw that it was to be read as 'I'm so meta, even this acronym is meta' but as I don't know what it means to be 'meta' this didn't get me very far. The wikipedia article on 'meta' hasn't enlightened me.

Plutarch wrote:I saw that it was to be read as 'I'm so meta, even this acronym is meta' but as I don't know what it means to be 'meta' this didn't get me very far. The wikipedia article on 'meta' hasn't enlightened me.

Why do I get the feeling I'm risking a "whoosh" here?

Plutarch, meta is the commonly used prefix for self-referential; it says so right in the Wikipedia article.

Plutarch wrote:I saw that it was to be read as 'I'm so meta, even this acronym is meta' but as I don't know what it means to be 'meta' this didn't get me very far. The wikipedia article on 'meta' hasn't enlightened me.

Why do I get the feeling I'm risking a "whoosh" here?

Plutarch, meta is the commonly used prefix for self-referential; it says so right in the Wikipedia article.

I must be missing somethign obvious here, but… I see how it's used as a prefix, but I still don't understand what it means when used on its own. What does it mean to say 'I'm so meta?'

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche

I've heard it argued that at least some of M Night Shyamalan's movies are meta-stories.The Sixth Sense is a ghost story about ghosts telling (their personal) storiesUnbreakable is a comic book movie where comic books are key to the plot

My favourite self-referential moment in pop culture, at least this week-end, is from John Sebastian's song Jug Band Music. Each of the first three verses ends with the line 'The doctor said, "Give him jug band music, it seems to make him feel just fine,"'; before the equivalent point in the fourth and last verse the lyrics are:

He emptied-out his eardrums, I emptied-out mineAnd everybody knows that the very last line is,'The doctor said, "Give him jug band music, it seems to make him feel just fine."'

Breaking the fourth wall, another level of nested quoting, and a self-reference all in one (although the last two go together).

(Of course, a more common but pseudo- self-referential trope in Sixties music was a song about the dance supposedly meant to go with the song: The Twist, The Swim, The Locomotion.)

dp2 wrote:I've heard it argued that at least some of M Night Shyamalan's movies are meta-stories.The Sixth Sense is a ghost story about ghosts telling (their personal) storiesUnbreakable is a comic book movie where comic books are key to the plot

The most meta movie I can think of is "Adaptation". A screenwriter adapting a book by writing about himself adapting it.